Massimo has already provided the references to
Roy Patterson's work, which is the more recent. Most people don't
bother looking at the classic work , but there was some excellent work
done by early researchers. The classic work on duration threshold
for pitch is listed below.

Don't forget that the
spectrum of a segment of a sinusoid is not a single frequency, but a sinc
function whose bandwidth is inversely proportional to duration.
There is a discussion of this in Licklider's classic chapter in Stevens'
Handbook from the 1950s.Dick
Pastore

The interesting result is that, when compared to vision, the auditory
system
extracts first complex features (i.e. timbre) and later simple features
(i.e.
octave and chroma). It seems that the visual system operates in the
opposite
way (e.g. Marr, 1982): first simple features then complex
features.